What are y'all working on lately?
@mauve Getting my ebook reader onto mobile platforms! We went from having no mobile support on the start of May 16 to having both iOS and Android with native SwiftUI/Kotlin apps, respectively ,just calling into a shared Rust core on May 30. They're not perfect yet, but that was really fun.
@TheQuinbox Oh wow! That sounds great. Is your project published somewhere I may read?
Rust core + RPC for UIs is a fun pattern IMO. Are you parsing the books into a tree and rendering using the raw Text nodes instead of rasters?
@mauve Yeah, it's on GitHub: https://github.com/trypsynth/paperback and the official site is https://paperback.dev. I create these things called markers, that form a tree of where headings, links, images, tables, etc are. It also ships with a CLI tool as of late, so you can get all its parsers (legacy/modern word, legacy/modern powerpoint, chm, rtf, epub, pdf, f2b, daisy, etc) from the CLI. Or, just pull in paperback-core and call into the parsers directly.
@TheQuinbox Epic! I don't have a go-to reader on Linux yet. I'll give it a shot some time. 🙇 I find a lot of readers aren't great for keyboard navigation which is essential for me since I use weird input devices and barely have a mouse.
@mauve Paperback is purely keyboard first, I don't ever use a mouse myself. The Linux support is largely untested though, so please feel free to open issues about it.
@TheQuinbox Cool will do! I don't use flatpak much so I'll probs start by just compiling it 😸
Do you navigate the app primarily with the screen reader accessibility tree?
@TheQuinbox Cool so you have the usual tree nav + app specific shortcuts? I ask cause I've been thinking about the UX for the reader I plan to make. I was thinking more along the lines of having "fuzzy search" over the tree and having it be global to the entire desktop so I can hop around quicker. Or adding "navigational bookmarks" to hop back to. Kinda like jumping around the filesystem using zoxide which is my main way to navigate my pooter right now. https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide
@mauve Yup, just standard screen reader APIs/native controls + keyboard accelerators.
@TheQuinbox Have you considered getting rid of the concept of pages entirely? I find they tend to be more annoying than helpful, especially with PDFs enforcing their own constraints on what a page is outside of the raw contents I actually care to listen to.
@mauve I have not, but that's just because they don't get in your way at all. Open up a 500 page pdf in paperback, there are no page markers visible anywhere, you just get a giant flat stream of text. Press p or shift+p, though, and you move between them. Or you can type a page number to jump to by hitting ctrl+p.
@TheQuinbox That makes sense. I usually navigate by chapters then skim through paragraph by paragraph until I get where I want. It'd be neat if indexes in books referenced line numbers or paragraph numbers for extra quick nav. IIRC Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein had markers like this for easy referencing when I read it.
Ty for the info! 🙇
@mauve I hope Paperback's wide array of navigation units will be enough for you ,not only do we have the quick-nav like I mentioned but also a table of contents treeview, powerful find, go to line/percent/page, and an elements dialog to show you either all headings or all links in a document. If not, once again I welcome GH issues :)
@TheQuinbox epic. Yeah I need to find some time to dig into it 🥳
@mauve Yup, entirely. I'm fully blind, so that's the only way I can do so. There are a crap-ton of shortcuts too, h/shift h to go through headings, p/shift p for pages, etc. Enspired by screen reader quick navigation commands on the web.